The Robot

General Idea

I'm making a robot that is controlled with my palm pilot. It will have two independently driven wheels for motion, and three infrared sensors to determine the range of things in front of it.

Step 1 - Building the body

I hollowed out an old CD-ROM drive for the main part of the body. I have attached a bracket type thing to hold the palm pilot. The bracket holds the pilot at about a 45 degree upwards angle. This is the allow the infrared sensor on the palm pilot to be able to receive signals from my TV remote control. After the initial design is done, and the software written for the pilot, I plan to add on and be able to control it with my DVD remote control. Inside the drive, I will mount the battery case, and all of the controlling circuits.
Here are some photos:

One interesting problem was the placement of the sensors. They can only see in one direction, and simply return a distance to the closest object they can see. The robot needs to be able to move around without bumping into things. Furthermore, eventually I want to be able to have it map where it's been, so it needs to be able to see more than just straight forward. These are some of my ideas on sensor placement:

Step 2 - Attaching the servos

This was easy.. I drilled a few holes, used my dremel to hollow out places for the axles to fit through, and screwed it on. The wheels got superglued to the servo-connectors, and the connectors attached to the servos.

Step 3 - Wiring the electronics

I just followed the scematics on the PPRK page.

Step 4 - Writting the palm pilot software

The SDK rocks! It's just a special version of GCC, so standard C/C++ code works just fine.

And here are pictures of the robot!.